Information technology (IT) administrators are responsible for the deployment and maintenance of rack-mounted computer equipment. To determine the operational status, performance and health of such systems, administrators remotely poll system information to obtain data, which is then viewed in some format on computer monitor displays, used to generate reports and/or used to provide alerts (e.g., send a page or an email message). Although these are valuable techniques, the data is innately abstracted from the systems being monitored. As a result, the data for a given machine needs to be somehow correlated back to that physical machine so as to give spatial relevancy to the data. This needs to be done using another medium, such as a representative drawing, a predetermined nomenclature, and so forth. It is often confusing and time consuming to determine which data-identified machine is which physical machine among many racks of servers.
Some servers have device-integrated alert mechanisms available, such as a dim blinking red light or a small (e.g., one-line) LCD screen. However, these provide little value to administrators, as they are difficult to see. Moreover, such mechanisms are not consistently implemented by various vendors; for example, among different vendors, different colors, text and/or flash patterns mean different things. As a result, even when present, such small, inconsistent lights/screens are mostly unnoticed and/or ignored.